As some of you may know, I have joined a sketch comedy group called The Ice Cream Social Job. We have been producing short videos over the last several months. I am particularly proud of this video because I wrote it, I appeared in it, and I edited the darn thing. Plus I think it is rather funny and it is at least tangentially relevant to Halloween.

My daughter updated her MacBook to the latest OS. I believe it is "El Capitan." She restarted her computer and was met with the message: "Your computer is disabled. Try again in 60 minutes. But seriously. Fuck you."

We both looked around and couldn't find this as a common occurrence. Indeed, no one else seemed to have this issue.. She has a Genius Bar appointment set up for later today. I'll follow up with more info as I learn it. Seems like someone at Apple has gone rogue.

With the New Year comes new resolutions. This year we're going to do a couple things. First we are going to try community gardening and I am looking for a good Westside location for that. Recommendations are always welcome. I also want to work on our emergency preparedness and get out emergency supplies in order.

Our latest web site development project has just launched. It is a fully responsive, WordPress site with e-commerce features. Because the subject matter was paper craft and card making, we worked closely with the store owner and blogger, Catherine St. Clair, to convey a "hand-made" feel. We used shadows and textured images along with her original hand made art.

Today we added a couple new logos in the Motion City logo portfolio. The portfolio now includes logos for Popsitivity and Cadence Culture. Popsitivity is a non-profit that encourages scholastic achievement for at-risk students by connecting them to mentoring pop stars. Cadence Culture is an online destination for street biking news and events.

You are not subscribed to the Motion City newsletter. How do i know this? Because very, very few have subscribed and I'm just playing the odds here.

I ask that you view the bottom section of any page on http://motioncity.com take a second and enter your email address in there. I swear to you I will not overwhelm you with spam. In fact I have only sent out two email updates so far this year. Also, I promise to guard your email and share it with no one.

News articles on motioncity.com will now be automatically posted to Twitter and Facebook. Like some mindless robot this site will take each new post, chop it down to less that 140 characters and send it off to Twitter. It will also put a post up on my Facebook page as well.

MotionCity.com is now powered by voice search. If you don't feel like typing in your search term, you can now simply click on the microphone icon and speak your search term. (Not the one on the right, that is just a picture. You need the one in the search box to the left. Don't see it? Read on.)

Way back when, at the dawn of Motion City Films, there was only one commercial application for creating animation. It was a program called Macromedia Director. We bought this program and used it to create animations for an MTV contest, many corporate videos for companies like AAA (the Auto Club), Sheppard Associates, Ingram/Micro-D, and even Mattel.

Throughout the past year I participated in the public Beta of Adobe's new Edge product. It is now released as Adobe Edge Animate 1.0. The big news: Adobe is releasing this powerful tool for FREE. You can read the announcement here. Like a modern iPhone game developer or a crack dealer of old, Adobe is giving you this "taste" for free, certain that, as the product evolves, you will return with money in hand, ready to buy some more. And you will.